The media viewing environment consists of a core piece of technology called the intelligent window layout manager. This media viewing layout manager according to the present invention (See FIG. 1) automatically positions and organizes the constrained and extendable media windows and achieves a different type of user experience than has previously been available in a web browser. The system does this by allowing users to explore multiple “windows” easily without needing to open an additional browser window, grant more viewing space when necessary, and remove the added viewing space to save users time cleaning up and managing their viewing space.
Historically, window managers have operated by primarily manual interaction, such that users who open, close, move, minimize, maximize, etc windows must do so without any automated help from the computer. Some automatic systems have existed to help users with dragging files over windows that are partially off-screen (and bringing them onscreen for the purposes of the drag drop target, like the Mac OS X Finder), or helping users find windows more easily (Mac OS X's Exposé feature), but none have built a system for automatically managing windows within a constrained, but extendable viewing environment. For example, in the above case of Expose, the premise is that windows accumulate into a clutter of overlapping windows over time and users have difficulty finding a specific window. With Expose, users press a button and the windows all minimize to a thumbnailed version of their size and are positioned so that all are visible in the fixed display resolution of the screen and are non-overlapping. Expose does not assume that the fixed resolution of the screen can be extended, in that it does not create new space outside the fixed resolution of the screen when not enough space is available. Instead, Expose must shrink the windows until they are small enough that all are visible in one constrained but non-extendable resolution of the screen.